Remembering Ruth Rendell, Master Of Smart And Socially Aware Suspense : NPR Remembering Ruth Rendell, Master Of Smart And Socially Aware Suspense Embed Embed Remembering Ruth Rendell, Master Of Smart And Socially Aware Suspense Remembering Ruth Rendell, Master Of Smart And Socially Aware Suspense Embed Embed Ruth Rendell wrote more than 60 books, some under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Max Nash/AP hide caption toggle caption Ruth Rendell wrote more than 60 books, some under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Max Nash/AP When the news of Ruth Rendell's death broke last weekend, I searched for some of her novels on my mystery bookshelves. Rendell, 85, wrote more than 60 novels, so I should've been able to find a few, but no dice. I'm forever giving Rendell's novels away to people who need a good book. What made Rendell extraordinary was her consummate simplicity.

As a writer, she was akin to the medieval artist Giotto — or at least to the apocryphal story about Giotto, who, when asked to submit a sample of his work to the pope, proceeded to dip a brush in red paint and draw a perfect circle freehand. Likewise, Rendell flawlessly executed the basic elements of the classic British detective novel. Unlike the books written by her good friend and fellow mystery master P.D. James, Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford novels aren't distinguished by their vivid off-kilter settings or by the Holmes-ian quirks of a loner detective. Instead, when "Reg" Wexford was introduced in 1964 in Rendell's debut, From Doon With Death, readers met Detective Normal — a middle-aged married man with children, whose politics leaned left and who liked to open up a good book at the end of a rough day. Article continues after sponsorship Crimes in Wexford's world were committed in mundane locales: busy roads, suburban villas and even vicarages.

The Wexford novels are as traditionally British as a hunk of bloody roast beef — overlaid, that is, with a piquant sauce of nouvelle social criticism. Because what Rendell did add to the basic formula was a contemporary awareness of racism and sexism. The vicar whose body is discovered in that vicarage in the Wexford novel called No Man's Nightingale is not your standard-issue Agatha Christie cleric, but rather a mixed-race single mother named Sarah Hussain, whose position as an ordained priest in the Church of England doesn't sit well with all her congregants. Related NPR Stories Ruth Rendell, Taking Readers '13 Steps Down' Another recent Wexford novel called Not In The Flesh opens in time-honored fashion with a truffle-hunting hound unearthing the skeletal remains of a human hand in the English countryside. The story soon veers into less traditional byways when Wexford confronts the brutality of female genital mutilation among a community of Somali immigrants.

By the way, Rendell, who was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire and sat in the House of Lords for Labour, campaigned in "real life" as well as in her fiction against the practice of female circumcision. One of the British obituaries for Rendell wisely pointed out that, through her death, we readers have lost not one, but two legendary suspense writers. That's because Rendell, starting in 1986, began writing more nuanced, intricate novels of psychological suspense under the pen name Barbara Vine. Many years ago, a friend left a copy of A Dark-Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine's first novel, outside my apartment door with a note that said: "I wish I were reading this novel for the first time." That was one of the best gifts I've ever received and, subsequently, I've probably bought and given away more copies of that novel than any other. Rendell was a great admirer of Henry James and her Barbara Vine novels retrospectively trace a main character's dawning awareness of something "off" in his or her world.

Here's a snippet from the opening of a recent Vine novel, called The Child's Child , in which two 20-something siblings inherit their grandmother's mansion. Our narrator, Grace, explains why she and her brother Andrew made the decision to live there together: Surely [we thought] a house with four living-rooms, six bedrooms, and three bathrooms ... was big enough for a man and woman who always got on with each other. ... There was only one thing we never thought about, though why not I don't know. We were both young, and ... each had had several partners, and one of us, perhaps both, was likely to have a lover living in. In Andrew's case that happened quite soon after we moved in. You already know from the get-go that situation isn't going to end well; the thrill, of course, lies in discovering why. A final stand-alone Rendell novel called Dark Corners is scheduled for publication this October. Like so many of her other fans, I'm grateful to have one last Rendell mystery ahead of me to read for the first time.

A Dark-Adapted Eye - Barbara Vine - Google Books Barbara Vine 0 Reviews A Dark-Adapted Eye - a prize-winning crime classic by bestselling author Barbara Vine Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award 'A rich, complex and beautifully crafted novel' P.D. James 'Compulsively readable ... a carefully devised plot unfolded with the most cunning art. Wilkie Collins and Dickens would have admired it' Sunday Times Like most families they had their secrets . . . And they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder. 'Brilliantly plotted. Vine is not afraid to walk down the mean streets of the mind and can build up an almost tangible atmosphere of menace and unease' Daily Telegraph 'Will linger in your memory long after you have closed the book. A first-rate novel' Washington Post A Dark-Adapted Eye is modern classic.

If you enjoy the crime novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love this book. Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.

Ruth Rendell (Author of From Doon With Death) Discover new books on Goodreads See if your friends have read any of Ruth Rendell's books The Minotaur by Barbara Vine · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Fiction Mystery The Minotaur - a thrilling novel from the bestselling queen of crime Barbara Vine Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway. Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own ... 'The reader is kept in suspense throughout . . . vintage wine from the Rendell vine' Independent 'The Cosway family is a mesmerizing creation...

I rushed through the last pages' Penelope Lively, Sunday Times 'Stealthy, credible, ingenious and addictive' Literary Review 'The Rendell/ Vine partnership has for years been producing consistently better work than most Booker winners put together' Ian Rankin The Minotaur is a modern masterpiece of the crime genre and will leave you gripped from the first page to the last. If you enjoy the novels of P.D. James, Ian Rankin and Scott Turow, you will love this book. Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fifteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Her other books include: A Dark Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs; Gallowglass; Asta's Book; No Night Is Too Long; In the Time of His Prosperity; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweeper's Boy; Grasshopper; The Blood Doctor; The Minotaur; The Birthday Present and The Child's Child.

Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland Format Adobe EPUB eBook 1.7 MB Barbara Vine (Author) Barbara Vine was the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, and Viking published all of her books under that name. Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, with worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, and regular Sunday Times bestsellers. Rendell w... Ruth Rendell obituary | Books | The Guardian Ruth Rendell Ruth Rendell obituary Crime novelist famed for her Inspector Wexford books who also wrote dark and chilling thrillers under the pen name Barbara Vine Ruth Rendell in 2004. She liked to concentrate more on character and psychology rather than old-fashioned police procedure in her novels. Photograph: ITV/Rex Saturday 2 May 2015 09.03 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 09.45 EDT Share on Messenger Close Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who has died aged 85, was a literary phenomenon.

From 1964, when her country copper, Reg Wexford, first stepped before the reading public in From Doon With Death , she wrote more than 50 crime novels and seven books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films; the Wexford books in particular were an enormous success on TV, with the actor George Baker playing Wexford as a big, gruff, rural policeman, solving crime in the fictional Sussex town of Kingsmarkham. But Rendell was never satisfied with producing the annual whodunnit. She demonstrated this when, rather than follow her first Wexford novel with more of the same, she daringly jumped away from the classic English mystery in her second book, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), and gave readers a taste of the psychological thrillers to come. Ruth Rendell: In quotes Read more The cliched view of Rendell is that she suddenly changed her style when, in the 1980s, she started writing as Barbara Vine, but the truth is that from the beginning, even in the Wexford tales, she concentrated more on character and psychology than old-fashioned police procedure.

She wrote 24 Wexford books and produced an equal number of thrillers under the name Rendell. Her first novel as Barbara Vine was A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe award. The next year, a second Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion, won her the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger. The big difference with the Barbara Vine stories was that in them she went inside the heads of her psychopathic killers and rapists. It was this that made them so dark and chilling, an uncomfortable read for fans of Wexford who were used to the protection of the country officer standing between them and an unsafe world. Because of this, Rendell’s fans fell into two rather warring camps, those who liked the Wexford stories and those who felt that Barbara Vine was a great “real” novelist breaking new ground. The books were all, however, bestsellers. There might also have been a third camp, those who loved her wonderful short stories. This was a dying, or dead, market in Britain, but Rendell was able to sell short stories in the US to publications such as the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Although Rendell did not like the title often bestowed on her – queen of crime – calling it snide and sexist, she did not go along with the many reviewers, among them AN Wilson and PD James , who called her a great novelist. “Nobody in their senses is going to call me a first-class writer,” she said. “I don’t mind because I do the very best that I can and thousands, millions of people enjoy my books.” Pinterest George Baker as Detective Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and Louie Ramsay as Dora Wexford in ITV’s The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, 1988. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features A very private person, who could get prickly with interviewers, she nevertheless said that she was going to take an active part in politics when she was made a life peer in 1997. That year she had given £10,000 to the Labour election campaign. In the Lords, Rendell supported the bill to legalise assisted suicide: “The way I’m going it won’t be long, but all my aunts lived into their 90s.”.

Daughter of Ebba (nee Krause) and Arthur Grasemann, she was born in South Woodford, north-east London . Her mother, who had been born in Sweden and lived in Denmark until she was 12, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Ruth, an only child, was brought up in part by a housekeeper to whom, she said, she was much closer than she was to her mother. Her father she described as “endlessly patient, endlessly loving, and endlessly kind”. She put a lot of him into Wexford. She went to Loughton high school, in Essex, and was, she said, very unhappy. But she began to find herself when she left school and became a journalist. She worked on the Chigwell Times and by the age of 22 was a top reporter. Trouble came her way when she wrote a story about an old deserted house and invented a ghost; the owner of the house threatened to sue. Shortly afterwards she skipped the annual meeting of a local tennis club and wrote the story up from the chairman’s pre-prepared speech of which she had a copy.

After her piece appeared in print she learned that the chairman had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of delivering it. She quit before she was sacked. Ruth Rendell: five key works Read more Aged 20 she had married Don Rendell, a reporter whom she met when they were both covering an inquest. He became a financial journalist on the Daily Mail and for 10 years Rendell was a wife and mother. She described these as happy years but during that time she went through a long apprenticeship, writing six novels, all of which were rejected. When her seventh, From Doon With Death, was accepted by the small publishing house of John Long, she received £75 for it. “No interviews then,” she said, “nor for the next two novels.” Later she was frequently interviewed, though she was never a willing subject. Asked once too often what she would have been if she hadn’t become a novelist, she said a country and western singer. It came as a shock when, during an interview oon Norwegian TV, she was handed a microphone and asked to sing.

Asked on BBC Radio 4 about how she wrote her short stories, she said: “Oh they just come to me.” She described what drove her to write by saying: “I like to sit at a desk and type.” Rendell claimed that, when writing her novels, she never did any research but “simply made things up”. Later on, she hired a researcher, but the great detail she gave her stories was the result, she said, of going on long walks, especially in London. She became an expert on parks in the capital. Her hobby was changing houses; she moved 18 times. For several years, she lived in a pink 16th-century manor house set in 11 acres in Suffolk, before returning to London. Her only digression from a rather set, humdrum routine came when in 1975 she divorced her husband and then two years later remarried him. Asked why, she said that after they separated, she found she couldn’t live without him, because he was the sort of man with whom you could go on a 200-mile car trip and never have to say a word.

No one can equal Ruth Rendell's range or accomplishment | Val McDermid Read more The Mystery Writers of America gave her three Edgars and the British Crimewriters’ Association awarded her several Golden and Silver Daggers. In 1991 she received the Cartier Diamond award for outstanding contribution to the crime genre. She showed no sign of slowing up: No Man’s Nightingale, published in 2013, was a classic Wexford; and in 2014 she created a new detective, Colin Quell, for The Girl Next Door. Rendell was very generous and gave a large amount of money away. She was vice-president of the housing charity Shelter and raised money for Little Hearts Matter, which helps children with heart disease. She said she knew what it was like to have no cash, adding: “I don’t think it’s good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.” Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by her son, Simon.

• Ruth Barbara Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, writer, born 17 February 1930; died 2 May 2015 Ecalpemos – expulsion from paradise? | Books to the Ceiling Books to the Ceiling April 25, 2012 at 1:57 am ( Book review , books , Mystery fiction ) Under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell has written a series of psychological thrillers which are distinguished by the subtlety with which they draw readers into tangled webs of love, guilt and remorse. 100 Must-read Crime Novels, Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison A Fatal Inversion came out in the mid 1980’s. Much of the novel’s action takes place during that time period, and also ten years earlier. It is during that earlier period that a 19-year-old boy named Adam Verne-Smith inherits a house. Not just any house – this one is quite grand, with a beautiful garden and an adjacent woodland. It is all quite idyllic – you could almost say, Edenic. The house is called Wyvis Hall.

It’s a family home and was lived in by Adam’s great-uncle Hilbert until the time of that person’s death. Adam was well acquainted with Wyvis Hall, having gone there as a child with his parents. In point of fact Lewis Verne-Smith, Adam’s father, had expected to be the new owner of Wyvis Hal. However, Lewis’s sycophantic ways got under Hilbert’s skin. The old man willed the property to the son, largely to spite the father. At the time that Adam comes into his inheritance, he’s the archetypal impoverished student. His first thought is to sell Wyvis Hall, take the money and run. He drives down to the property with his friend Rufus, a pre-med student. And his experience of the place on this particular visit changes everything: On either side the drift was thick with cow parsley, its powdery white heads coming to an end of their long blooming. It had a sweetish scent, like icing sugar, like childhood birthday cakes, that mingled with the winy perfume of the elders.

All the trees were in full leaf but the oaks and beeches had not long so been, so that t heir foliage was still a fresh bright color and the lime trees were hung with pale yellow-green dangling flowers. The pinewood looked just the same as ever, it always did, it was always dark and dense with very narrow passages through it that would surely allow nothing bigger than a fox to weave its way through. Imperceptibly the trees must have grown, yet they seemed to Adam no different from when he was a child coming up to fetch the milk and when, on sunless mornings, he had felt a kind of menace from the wood. Even then he had not liked to look into it too much but had kept his eyes on the ground or straight ahead of him because the wood was the kind of place you saw in storybook illustrations or even in your dreams and out of which things were liable to come creeping. And then, there is the house itself: Things, buildings, stretches of land, are said to look smaller when we grow up. And this seems only natural, just what one would expect….Wyvis Hall, logically, should have looked smaller to Adam but it did not, it looked much larger.

This must have been because it was his now, he owned it. It was his and it seemed a palace. Vine/Rendell’s description of the Hall’s exterior is so richly detailed that it fairly shimmers in the reader’s mind: The whole area out here was paved and small stonecrops and sedums with white and yellow starry flowers grew up between the tones. In a couple of narrow-mouthed stone vessels grew a conifer and a bay tree. The rose which mantled the house must have put out a thousand flowers and these were at the peak of their blooming, not a petal yet shed, each blossom the pink of a shell within and the pink of coral on its outer side. And on it goes. Adam fishes the key out of his pocket and prepares to enter his newly acquired domain: “He was aware of a profoundly warm, placid, peaceful silence, as if the house were a happy animal asleep in the sun.” Almost from the beginning, this novel exerted exceptional sway over my mental processes. When I wasn’t actually immersed in the text, I was brooding over the direction the narrative was taking.

This powerful pull was partly due, I think, to the artful way in which Rendell structured this novel. We follow the action primarily through the eyes of three men: Adam, Rufus, and a third person, Shiva Manjusri. All of these individuals were present at Wyvis Hall during the fateful summer of 1976. The novel begins in the present time of the mid-1980’s. A ghoulish discovery has been made on the grounds of the Hall. It threatens to implicate Adam, Rufus, and Shiva in a ghastly event that took place while they were all three living there. But it is clear that even before the revelation becomes public knowledge, these three men have each been living lives deformed by guilty knowledge. Here’s the thing, though: Rendell withholds that knowledge from the reader for as long as possible, revealing its contours only gradually, as the novel progresses. At times I found this exasperating, but even more than that, I found it addicting. I simply had to know. One of the signal triumphs of A Fatal Inversion is the degree to which Rendell takes you inside the minds of her characters.

This is often an uncomfortable place to be – even excruciating, Yet in was the only way to understand how the events of the summer of 1976 could ever have taken place. And lest you wonder – there were women at Wyvis Hall. First there was Mary Gage, Rufus’s girlfriend. Then after Mary came Vivien, who arrived with Shiva. And finally, there was Zosie, she of the strange name and even stranger demeanor. What a combustible crew they proved to be, despite the indolent days they spent lying on the back patio on comforters and quilts piled higgledy piggledy, drinking wine and smoking dope, beneath the abnormally hot sun of that fateful summer season. The plan had originally been for Adam, Mary, and Rufus to spend the summer in Greece, living off the proceeds of the sale of Adam’s property. This never happened, but at least, they thought, they could come up with another name for Wyvis Hall – something that sounded Greek. This they did: by inverting the word “Someplace.” It proved to be a fatal inversion…. The theme of expulsion from the garden of Eden resonates from time to time in this novel.

But in the Bible, a right to be present in that blessed place is premised on the possession of an innocent and unsullied nature. Alas, none of these protagonists were possessed of such a nature. They were deeply flawed human beings, before the terrible unraveling ever began. In their youth, they were heedless and arrogant, taking their pleasures too freely, with no thought for the consequences. They brought the serpent with them, despoiling a place of pristine beauty almost from the moment they arrived there. There were occasional glimmers of humanity and generosity among them – but not many. Mary Gage was, in my view, the best of the lot, and even that’s not saying much. Nevertheless, I could not put this book down. It had the quality almost of a fable, a morality tale. And enraging though the characters’ behavior often was, one wanted to know their respective fates. Would they have the chance to redeem themselves? In A Fatal Inversion, the first book published under the pseudonym, all the qualities which have made the Barbara Vine novels so powerful, were already in place.

(100 Must-read Crime Novels.) Passionate Ruth Rendell fan that I am, I’ve known about this book for a long time, and have always meant to read it. Then last month, I saw it listed in a Wall Street Journal feature piece as one of “Five Best Psychological Mysteries.” Time to read it. Maybe it was my mood, but right now I consider A Fatal Inversion to be the best novel of psychological suspense that I have ever read Even so, I have questions about what happened at the end and would like to talk to someone about them. In point of fact, I think A Fatal Inversion would be a great book discussion book. Unfortunately, it’s not in print in the U.S. Also it is not owned by the Howard County Library System, although it is available through interlibrary loan. I downloaded it onto my Kindle at a a cost of $10.08. .

Ruth Rendell, Taking Readers '13 Steps Down' : NPR Ruth Rendell, Taking Readers '13 Steps Down' Embed Embed Ruth Rendell, Taking Readers '13 Steps Down' Ruth Rendell, Taking Readers '13 Steps Down' Embed Embed Ruth Rendell has written five dozen books. The latest is a tale of obsession, superstition and violence. hide caption toggle caption Ruth Rendell has written 60 novels of murder and suspense, some of them under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. She has another title, too: Baroness of Babergh. And in that role, she has served for the past eight years in Britain's House of Lords. Her latest book is called 13 Steps Down. It's a violent tale of obsession and superstition, featuring an 80-year-old landlady who increasingly prefers books to people, a fitness-equipment repairman with a thing for a serial killer, and a supermodel who isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Read an excerpt from 13 Steps Down: Mix was standing where the street should have been. Or where he thought it should have been. By this time shock and disbelief were past.

Bitter disappointment, then rage, filled his body and climbed into his throat, half choking him. How dared they? How could they, whoever they were, destroy what should have been a national monument? The house itself should have been a museum, one of those blue plaques high up on its wall, the garden, lovingly preserved just as it was, part of a tour visiting parties could have made. If they had wanted a curator they need have looked no further than him. Article continues after sponsorship Everything was new, carefully and soullessly designed. 'Soulless' — that was the word and he was proud of himself for thinking it up. The place was pretty, he thought in disgust, typical yuppie-land building. The petunias in the flowerbeds particularly enraged him. Of course he knew that some time back before he was born they had changed the name from Rillington Place to Ruston Close but now there wasn't even a Ruston Close any more. He had brought an old map with him but it was useless, harder to find the old streets than searching for the child's features in the fifty-year-old face. Fifty years was right. It would be half a century since Reggie was caught and hanged.

If they had to rename the streets, surely they could have put up a sign somewhere which said, Formerly Rillington Place. Or something to tell visitors they were in Reggie country. Hundreds must come here, some of them expectant and deeply disappointed, others knowing nothing of the place’s history, all of them encountering this smart little enclave ofred brick and raised flowerbeds, geraniums and busy lizzies spilling out of window-boxes, and trees chosen for their golden and creamy white foliage. It was midsummer and a fine day, the sky a cloudless blue. The little grass plots were a bright and lush green, a pink climbing plant draping a rosy cloak over walls cunningly constructed on varying levels. Mix turned away, the choking anger making his heart beat faster and more loudly, thud, thud, thud. If he had known everything had been eradicated, he would never have considered the flat in St Blaise House. He had come to this corner of Notting Hill solely because it had been Reggie's district.

Of course he had known the house itself was gone and its neighbours too but still he had been confident the place would be easily recognisable, a street shunned by the fainthearted, frequented by intelligent enthusiasts like himself. But the feeble, the squeamish, the politically correct had had their way and torn it all down. They would have been laughing at the likes of him, he thought, and triumphant at replacing history with a tasteless housing estate. The visit itself he had been saving up as a treat for when he was settled in. A treat! How often, when he was a child, had a promised treat turned into a let-down? Too often, he seemed to remember, and it didn't stop when one was grown-up and a responsible person. Still, he wasn't moving again, not after paying Ed and his mate to paint the place and refit the kitchen. He turned his back on the pretty little new houses, the trees and flowerbeds, and walked slowly up Oxford Gardens and across Ladbroke Grove to view the house where Reggie's first victim had had a room. At least that wasn't changed.

By the look of it, no one had painted it since the woman's death in 1943. No one seemed to know which room it had been, there were no details in any of the books he'd read. He gazed at the windows, speculating and making guesses, until someone looked out at him and he thought he'd better move on. St. Blaise Avenue was quite up-market where it crossed Oxford Gardens, tree-lined with ornamental cherries, but the further he walked downhill it too went down until it was all sixties local authority housing, dry cleaners and motorcycle spare parts places and corner shops. All except for the terrace on the other side, isolated elegant Victorian, and the big house, the only one like it in the whole neighbourhood that wasn't divided into a dozen flats, St Blaise House. Pity they hadn't pulled that lot down, Mix thought, and left Rillington Place alone. No cherries here but great dusty plane trees with huge leaves and bark peeling off their trunks. They were partly responsible for making the place so dark.

He paused to look at the house, marvelling at its size, as he always did, and wondering why on earth the old woman hadn't sold it to a developer years ago. Three floors high, it was of once-white, now grey, stucco, with steps up to a great front door that was half hidden in the depths of a pillared portico. Above, almost under the eaves, was a circular window quite different from the other oblong windows, being of stained glass, clouded by the accumulation of grime built up over the years since it had last been cleaned. Mix let himself in. The hallway alone, he had thought when he first saw the place, was big enough for a normal-size flat to fit inside, big, square and dark like everything in there. Big dark chairs with carved backs stood uselessly against the walls, one of them under a huge mirror in a carved wooden frame, its glass all spotted with greenish blots like islands on a map of the sea. Stairs went down to a basement but he had never been in it and as far as he knew no one else had for years and years.

When he came in he always hoped she wouldn't be anywhere about and usually she wasn't, but today he was out of luck. Dressed in her usual garments, long droopy cardigan and skirt with a dipping hemline, she was standing beside a huge carved table which must have weighed a ton, holding up a coloured flyer advertising a Tibetan restaurant. When she saw him she said, 'Good afternoon, Mr Cellini,' in her upper-class drawl, putting, he thought, a lot of scorn into her voice. When he spoke to Gwendolen Chawcer, when addressing her was unavoidable, he did his best to shock her – so far without marked success. 'You'll never guess where I've been.' 'That is almost a certainty,' she said. 'So it seems pointless to attempt it.' Sarcastic old bitch. 'Rillington Place,' he said, 'or where it used to be. I wanted to see where Christie buried all those women he killed in his garden but there’s not a trace of it left.' She put the flyer back on the table. No doubt, it would lie there for months. Then she surprised him.

'I went to his house once,' she said, 'when I was young.' 'You did? Why was that?' He knew she wouldn't be forthcoming and she wasn't. 'I had a reason to go there. The visit lasted no more than half an hour. He was an unpleasant man.' He couldn't control his excitement. 'What sort of an impression did he make on you? Did you feel you were in the presence of a murderer? Was his wife there?' She laughed her cold laugh. 'Goodness, Mr Cellini, I've no time to answer all these questions. I have to get on.' With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books, she was always at it. He felt frustrated after her unsatisfactory but provocative response. She might be a mine of information about Reggie but she was too stand-offish to talk about it. He began to mount the stairs, hating them with a fierce hatred, though they were not narrow or precarious or winding. There were fifty-two and one of the things he disliked about them was that they were composed of three flights, twenty-two in this stretch, seventeen in the next, but thirteen in the top flight.

If there was anything which upset Mix more than unpleasant surprises and rude old women, it was the number thirteen. St Blaise House, fortunately, was number 54 St Blaise Avenue. One day when old Chawcer was out he had counted the bedrooms, not including his own, and found there were nine. Some were furnished, if you could call it furniture, some were not. The whole place was filthy. In his opinion, no one had done any housework in it for years, though he had seen her flicking about with a feather duster. All that woodwork, carved with shields and swords and helmets, faces and flowers, leaves and garlands and ribbons, lay under an ancient accumulation of dust. Banister was linked to banister and cornice to picture rail by ropes of cobwebs. She had lived here all her long life, first with her parents, then with her dad, then alone. Apart from that he knew nothing about her. He didn’t even know how she happened to have three bedrooms on the top floor already converted into a flat. The stairs grew narrower after the first landing and the last flight, the top one, was tiled, not carpeted.

Mix had never seen a staircase of shiny black tiles before but there were many things in Miss Chawcer's house he had never seen before. No matter what kind of shoes he wore, those tiles made a terrible noise, a thump-thumping or a clack-clacking, and his belief was that she had tiled the stairs so that she would be able to tell what time her tenant came in. He had already got into the habit of removing his shoes and continuing in his socks alone. It wasn’t that he ever did anything wrong but he didn't want her knowing his business. The stained glass window speckled the top landing with spots of coloured light. It was a picture of a girl looking into a pot with some sort of plant in it. When old Chawcer brought him up here for the first time she had called it the Isabella window and the picture, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, made very little sense to Mix. As far as he was concerned, basil was something growing in a bag you bought at Tesco. The girl looked ill, her face was the only bit of the glass that was white, and Mix resented having to see her each time he went into or came out of, his flat.

He called his home an apartment but Gwendolen Chawcer called it 'rooms'. She lived in the past, in his opinion, and not thirty or forty years ago like most old people but a hundred years. He had put in the bathroom himself with Ed and his mate's help and fitted the kitchen. He paid for it, so Miss Chawcer couldn't really complain. She ought to have been pleased; it would still be there for the next tenant when he was famous and had moved out. The fact was that she had never been able to see the need for a bathroom. When she was young, she told him, you had a chamber pot in your bedroom and a basin on the washstand and the maid brought you up a jug of hot water. Mix had a bedroom as well and a large living room, dominated by a huge poster photograph of Nerissa Nash, taken when a newspaper started naming the models as well as the clothes designers. That was in the days when they called her the poor man's Naomi Campbell. They did so no longer.

Mix stood in front of the poster, as he often did when he first came in, like a religious contemplating a holy picture, his lips murmuring, 'I love you, I adore you,' instead of prayers. * * * * * He was earning good money at Fiterama and he had spent freely on this flat. The chrome-encased television, video and DVD player were on the hire purchase as was most of the kitchen equipment but that, to use one of Ed's favourite expressions, was par for the course, everyone did it. He had paid for the white carpet and grey tweed suite with ready cash, buying the black marble statue of the nude girl on an impulse but not for a moment regretting his purchase. The poster of Nerissa he had had framed in the same chrome finish as the TV. In the black ash shelving he kept his collection of Reggie books: 10 Rillington Place, John Reginald Halliday Christie, The Christie Legend, Murder in Rillington Place and Christie's Victims among many others. Richard Attenborough's film of 10 Rillington Place he had on video and DVD.

It was outrageous, he thought, that one Hollywood movie after another was re-made while you never heard a thing about a re-make of that. The one he possessed he often played and the digital version was even better, clearer and brighter. Richard Attenborough was wonderful, he wasn't arguing about that, but he didn’t look much like Reggie. A taller actor was needed with sharper features and burning eyes. Mix was inclined to day-dream and sometimes he speculated as to whether he would be famous through knowing Nerissa or through his expert knowledge of Reggie. There was probably no one alive today, not even Ludovic Kennedy who had written the book, who knew more. It might be his mission in life to reawaken interest in Rillington Place and its most famous occupant, though how this was to come about after what he had seen that afternoon, was as yet a mystery. He would solve it, of course. Perhaps he would write a book about Reggie himself, and not one full of feeble comments on the man’s wickedness and depravity. His book would draw attention to the murderer as artist. It was getting on for six. Mix poured himself his favourite drink.

He had invented it himself and called it Boot Camp because it had such a savage kick. It mystified him that no one he had offered it to seemed to share his taste for a double measure of vodka, a glass of Sauvignon and a tablespoonful of Cointreau poured over crushed ice. His fridge was the kind which spewed out the crushed ice all prepared. He was just savouring the first sip when his mobile rang. It was Colette Gilbert-Bamber to tell him she was desperate to get her treadmill repaired. It might be no more than the electric plug or it might be something bigger. Her husband had gone out but she had had to stay at home because she was expecting an important phone call. Mix knew what all that meant. Being in love with his distant star, his queen and lady, didn't mean he was never to treat himself to a bit of fun. Once he and Nerissa were together, a recognised item, it would be a different thing. Regretfully but getting his priorities right, Mix put his Boot Camp into the fridge. He cleaned his teeth, gargled with a mouthwash which tasted not unlike his cocktail without the stimulus, and made his way down the stairs.

In the midst of the house you wouldn't have guessed how fine the day was and bright and hot the sunshine. Here it was always cold and strangely silent too, it always was. You couldn't hear the Hammersmith and City Line running above ground from Latimer Road to Shepherd's Bush, or the traffic in Ladbroke Grove. The only noise came from the Westway but if you didn't know you wouldn't have imagined you were listening to traffic. It sounded like the sea, like waves breaking on the shore, or what you hear when you hold a big seashell up to your ear, a soft unceasing roar. * * * * * These days Gwendolen sometimes needed the help of a magnifying glass to read small print. And, unfortunately, most of the books she wanted to read were printed in what she understood to be called 10-point. Her ordinary glasses couldn't cope with Papa's edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance, or what she was reading now, a very old copy of Middlemarch, published in the nineteenth century.

Like her bedroom above it, the drawing room encompassed the whole depth of the house, a pair of large sash windows overlooking the street, french windows at the back giving on the garden. When she was reading Gwendolen reclined on a sofa upholstered in dark brown corduroy, its back surmounted with a carved mahogany dragon. The dragon's tail curved round to meet one of the sofa arms, while its head reared up as it snarled at the black marble fireplace. Most of the furniture was rather like that, carved and thickly padded and covered in velvet which was brown or dull green or the dark red of claret, but some was made of dark veined marble with gilt legs. There was a very large mirror on one wall, framed in gilt leaves and fruit and curlicues, which had grown dull with time and lack of care. Beyond the french windows, open now to the warm evening light, lay the garden. Gwendolen still saw it as it used to be, the lawn closely mown to the smoothness of emerald velvet, the herbaceous border alight with flowers, the trees pruned to make the best of their luxuriant foliage.

Or, rather, she saw that it could be like that with a little attention, nothing that couldn’t be achieved by a day’s work. That the grass was knee high, the flowerbeds a mass of weeds and the trees ruined by dead branches, escaped her notice. The printed word was more real to her than a comfortable interior and pleasing exterior. Her mind and her memories too were occasionally stronger than the book; then she laid it down to stare at the brownish cobweb-hung ceiling and the dusty prisms on the chandelier, to think and to remember. The man Cellini she disliked, but that was of small importance. His inelegant conversation had awakened sleeping things, Christie and his murders, Rillington Place, her fear, Dr Reeves and Bertha. It must be at least fifty-two years ago, maybe fiftythree. Rillington Place had been a sordid slum, the terraces of houses with front doors opening on to the street, an iron foundry with a tall chimney at the far end of it. Until she went there she had no idea such places existed. She had led a sheltered life, both before that day and after it. Bertha would have married – those sort of people always did.

Probably had a string of children who by now would be middle-aged, the first one of them the cause of her misfortunes. Why did women behave like that? She had never understood. She had never been tempted. Not even with Dr Reeves. Her feelings for him had always been chaste and honourable, as had his for her. She was sure of that, in spite of his subsequent behaviour. Perhaps, after all, she had chosen the better part. What on earth made Cellini so interested in Christie? It wasn’t a healthy attitude of mind. Gwendolen picked up her book again. Not in this one but in another of George Eliot's, Adam Bede, there was a girl who had behaved like Bertha and met a dreadful fate. She read for another half-hour, lost to the world, oblivious to everything but the page in front of her. A footfall above her head alerted her. Poor as her sight was becoming, Gwendolen's hearing was superb. Not for a woman of her age but for anyone of any age. Her friend Olive Fordyce said she was sure Gwendolen could hear a bat squeak. She listened now. He was coming down the stairs.

No doubt he thought she didn’t know he took his shoes off in an attempt to come and go secretly. She was not so easily deceived. The lowest flight creaked. Nothing he could do would put a stop to that, she thought triumphantly. She heard him padding across the hall but when he closed the front door it was with a slam that shook the house and caused a whitish flake to drop off the ceiling on to her left foot. She went to one of the front windows and saw him getting into his car. It was a small blue car and, in her opinion, he kept it absurdly clean. When he had gone she went out to the kitchen, opened the door on an ancient and never-used spin dryer to take out a netting bag which had once held potatoes. The bag was full of keys. No labels were attached to them but she knew very well the shape and colour of the one she wanted. The key in the pocket of her cardigan, she began to mount the stairs. It was a long way up but she was used to it. She might be over eighty but she was thin and strong. Never in her life had she had a day's illness.

Of course she couldn't climb those stairs as fast as she could fifty years ago but that was only to be expected. Otto was sitting halfway up the top flight, dismembering and eating some small mammal. She took no notice of him nor he of her. The evening sun blazed through the Isabella window and since there was no wind to blow on the glass, a nearly perfect coloured picture of the girl and the pot of basil appeared reflected on the floor, a circular mosaic of reds and blues and purples and greens. Gwendolen stopped to admire it. Rarely indeed was this facsimile so clear and still. She lingered for only a minute or two before inserting her key in the lock and letting herself into Cellini's flat. All this white paint was unwise, she thought. It showed every mark. And grey was a bad furnishing colour, cold and stark. She walked into his bedroom, wondering why he bothered to make his bed when he would only have to unmake it at night. Everything was depressingly tidy. Very likely he suffered from that affliction she had read about in a newspaper, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The kitchen was just as bad.

It looked like one of those on show at the Ideal Home Exhibition, to which Olive had insisted on taking her some time in the eighties. A place for everything and everything in its place, not a packet or tin left on the counter, nothing in the sink. How could anyone live like that? She opened the door of the fridge. There was very little food to be seen but in the door rack were two bottles of wine and, in the very front of the middle shelf a nearly full glass of something that looked like faintly coloured water. Gwendolen sniffed it. Not water, certainly not. So he drank, did he? She couldn’t say she was surprised. Making her way back into the living room, she stopped at the bookshelves. Any books, no matter of what kind, always drew her attention. These were not the sort she would read, perhaps that anyone should read. All of them, except for one called Sex for Men in the 21st Century, were about Christie. She had scarcely thought about the man for more than forty years and today she seemed not to be able to get away from him. As for Cellini, this would be another of his obsessions.

The more I know people, said Gwendolen, quoting her father, the more I like books. She went downstairs and into the kitchen. There she fetched herself a cheese and pickle sandwich, readymade from the corner shop, and taking it and a glass of orange juice back to the dragon sofa, she returned to Middlemarch. Copyright © 2005 by Ruth Rendell. Reprinted courtesy of Crown Publishing Group. Barbara Vine Barbara Vine A pseudonym used by Ruth Rendell Rendell created a third strand of writing with the publication of A Dark Adapted Eye under her pseudonym Barbara Vine in 1986. Books such as King Solomon's Carpet, A Fatal Inversion and Anna's Book (original UK title Asta's Book) inhabit the same territory as her psychological crime novels while they further develop themes of family misunderstandings and the side effects of secrets kept and crimes done. Rendell is famous for her elegant prose and sharp insights into the human mind, as well as her ability to create cogent plots and characters. Rendell has also injected the social changes of the last 40 years into her work, bringing awareness to such issues as domestic violence and the change in the status of women.

Question: Who has written books under the pseudonym Barbara Vine?
Answer: Ruth Rendell